1. Auditorium

This game is one of the most pleasurable experiences I have had online in a while. The interface is breathtakingly elegant and remarkably intuitive.

2. Wired Deconstructs a Girl Talk Track

Wired does some brilliant information design to show the 35 samples and their relationship to one another on one of the tracks from Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals.

3. The Independent Explores Torrent Legend aXXo (Thanks @hartleyglobe)

The Independent delves into a subculture that you surprisingly don’t hear much about given the abundance of articles written about piracy in general. This is a must read for torrent fiends.

4. Twit Apps’ Replies

I find I am either in Twitter mode or I am not, but I am always in email mode. Twit Apps‘ Replies forwards any Twitter replies to your email inbox and you don’t even have to give up your Twitter credentials (UX folks check out the registration flow, it is pretty clever, if not a little limited). 

5. The Best iPhone Apps of 2008

Bryan Barletta from AppVee has done a great rundown on some of the top iPhone applications for 2008 for TechCrunch. For anybody looking to pitch or build iPhone applications in 2009, you could do a lot worse than to start by looking at this list.

I was having beers with a couple of friends the other night and we were talking about digital distribution of music and one of my friends remarked on having heard Steve Jobs once say that he didn’t feel that iTunes was competing with CDs, but that it was competing with piracy. I responded that that wasn’t how it looked from where I was sitting as iTunes has competed very well with CDs, pushing them down the path towards obsolescence while music piracy (I was thinking strictly downloads) is still going strong.

This lead me to begin to think about what was competing with illegal downloading and the answer more or less hit me in the face- streaming. As someone who has a copious number of MP3s of questionable provenance on my various hard drives and listens to music on a regular basis, I was surprised to realize that I have only downloaded 3 albums in the last 6 months (for comparison, at one point I would say I was downloading about 5 per day). It was such a gradual transition that I hadn’t really considered the implications of it or had even really been cognescent of it. More than 95-100% of the music I listen to on a daily basis comes to me streamed from services ranging from the blatantly illegal (you know who you are) to the legally ambiguous (Seeqpod) to the fully legitimate (imeem). Online streaming has all but killed off (illegal) downloading in my life. While this revelation was a little slow in the coming for me (so slow in fact that MySpace beat me to it), it gave me something to think on.

As mobile bandwidth becomes increasingly more accesible, the idea of a music collection will cease to exist. All MP3 devices will have network capabilities. Who needs a 120GB iPod when all the world’s music is just a wireless connection away? So if the evolution of music consumption in recent years is as follows, CD, MP3, streaming, what comes next? If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t have time to write rambling blog posts, but if Steve Jobs or anybody who else who claims to be competing with pirates wants to win, they better figure it out first or remain flexible enough to adjust and adapt when someonelse does.